Sticking to my guns, Drake and James Fauntleroy’s “Girls Love Beyonce” was a dope song and one that has since gone on to have a longer personal shelf life than “No New Friends.” Turns out JENI perhaps feels the same way.

With over 330,000 views on YouTube, chances are JENI isn’t new to a handful of people familiar with our small corner of the Internet. My girlfriend sent me an e-mail over the weekend imploring me to at least give it a view and offer my thoughts. Already a dark record in a sense, JENI helped create her own identity with her own sense of soulfulness. The “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” addition at the end wasn’t a bad look either. And I don’t know, maybe it was me already liking the song to begin with, but her covers of SBTRKT’s “Wildfire” and Justin Timberlake’s “Suit & Tie” may have been better than the aforementioned Aubrey cover featured below.

I’m still gathering info about JENI, but she’s got a believer in this guy. Plus, her music was like the perfect audio-painkiller following Game 5. Anywho, head over to her YouTube page to fully drown in the tunes of this still-mysterious songbird.

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I came across her a good while ago – I immediately wanted to sign her – until we got down to the business aspect.

She fails big time in that department. I do not know whom she is getting her advice on how to handle music and business from… but she needs to step away from them.

I refused to deal with her after that. She has A LOT to learn but does not seem as if she wishes to learn it. If she wants to make YouTube covers that sound dope though, she has got it covered. Anything else, anything bigger? Nah. Not until she learns how the business works and how to interact with all of the options 2013 offers you.

It may seem harsh but her and I are even from the same area and it still could not work. I still bump her music in the whip… but sometimes people learn the hard way. YouTube is not paying you as much as all of the other things. She does shows but, enh.

Saw the Suit and Tie joint a while back and i have the same reaction watching it again….She absolutely kills the cover. She killed the “Girls Love Beyonce” and “Wildfire” joints too. She’s got a lot of talent so hopefully those business issues TRA mentioned get cleared up so she can get an opportunity to display her talents to a larger audience if its in her plans.

Anyone with a nice voice or a unique voice/tone can pull of cover after cover with success (if a song is already a hit, the formula is already there, the template has been built as a hit) but it tells the executive nothing and it eventually halts or stunts the growth of the artist.

If you cannot write a hit, that is fine, I can find folks to do that for you – but there is far more potential in an artist who can write their own hit records.

I associate the above scenario to a rapper who can destroy emcees in a freestyle battle. But sign them, put them in the studio with a producer, and they cannot write a song to save their life. Sometimes, they have no idea on how the structure of a song even works (verse, hook, etc.).

Covers get you attention, but then it is up to you to bring those YouTube followers your original compositions. Covers can (and will) only ever take you so far.